Ford SVT 20th Anniversary - 2012 Chicago Auto Show

Burning rubber for two decades.

At the Chicago Auto Show, Ford Motor Co. marked a milestone with the 20th anniversary of its Special Vehicle Team, the in-house high-performance unit that has worked its magic on a wide variety of cars and trucks from the Blue Oval.

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SVT's roots go back to the early 1980s and the Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) team, which produced a series of performance vehicles ranging from variants of the Taurus to the Mustang. Reorganized in 1992 as SVT, the group built the SVT Mustang Cobra and SVT F-150 Lightning pickup. Later in the year, it also released a track-oriented Cobra R, of which only 107 were built.

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2000 Ford SVT Mustang Cobra R

In those early years, SVT concentrated primarily on Mustangs, increasing horsepower in the 5.0-liter pushrod V-8, which later gave way to the overhead cam 4.6-liter modular V-8 in 1996, which produced 305 bhp.

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1995 Ford SVT Mustang Cobra R

Moving beyond the Mustang, SVT introduced its take on the sport sedan with the 1998 Ford SVT Contour, which featured a manual transmission and pumped-up version of the 2.5-liter Duratec V-6, producing 195, then 200 bhp. Slightly more than 11,000 of these taut sport sedans were built between 1998 and 2000.

1998 Ford SVT Contour

SVT returned to the pickup market with the 1999 F-150 Lightning, which uses a 5.4-liter supercharged V-8 (a powerplant that would figure prominently later in the Ford GT and Shelby GT500). Then, after the third generation Cobra R in 2000, SVT turned its attention to the Focus in 2002.

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1999 Ford SVT F-150 Lightning

Work on these special models all but stopped when SVT was tapped to help develop the Ford GT. This mid-engine retro supercar featured SVT's input on the 5.4-liter supercharged V-8, which makes 500 bhp.

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2005 Ford GT

The GT project and the reuniting of Carroll Shelby with Ford spelled the beginning of end of using the SVT badge as a retail calling card. In 2007, Ford introduced the Mustang-based Shelby GT500. From then on, the highest performing Mustangs would carry the Shelby name instead of an SVT designation. Ford still uses the SVT name with the F-150 SVT Raptor, which was introduced in 2010, but with the return of an SVT-tuned Focus and Fiesta later this year, those cars will be designated ST models instead of SVT.

2013 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500

Still, SVT—now in charge of creating high-performance models on a global scale—remains as a stand-alone engineering unit within Ford's product development hierarchy.